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Tell you what, you can not owe taxes once you promise to never use a road again, never buy anything that was transported to you on a road paid for by the government again, waive all minimum wage and employment laws, repay your education starting from kindergarden with interest, waive all police, fire, emergency and other services, waive your right to ever use the court for any reason, and you can only use goods (including food) from places that have no regulatory structure and inspections.

ROFL. Oh dear gods you're one of those. Sorry, the world isn't out to get you. But tell you what- anytime you're tired of paying, feel free to leave. We'd be a better country with fewer of the insane around.

Except the initial investment was a tiny amount of CPU time. The person who wrote the original software made a ton of BC when it took no cost to create them.
And who created the bitcoin software? We don't know but I'm sure they are having fun selling off coins they got for free to suckers who just finished eating their tulip bulbs.

No, 100% of the risk is lack of utility. My supermarket, the local restaurants, and none of the places I spend money day to day take it. So its utility is 0. In fact its less than 0- I understand cash. With bitcoin I have to understand and deal with these "exchanges" things and make my purchases semi-public, where in real life I just hand them anonymous multi-colored pieces of paper. In fact I can't even pay for something unless I have an internet connection at hand. No thanks.

And my supermarket, the local restaurants and none of the places I spend money day to day take pounds. So their utility... oh, wait.

Bitcoin is equivalent to foreign cash and there certainly are enough places that take them so they do not lack utility any more than any other foreign currency (that could be instantly transferred across the world) would.

No, the initial investment was not a tiny amount of CPU time. The initial investment was in watching out for a workable decentralized currency and potentially trying out a lot of stuff that failed until one day bitcoin came along and was actually semi-successful. You are looking at it now in hindsight, and that is heavily misleading. It's like saying that an oil company's investment was only a single drilling rig when they worked for years beforehand to figure out where to start drilling.

Also, currencies have a network effect and thus need a critical mass to ever be successful. So, it is highly likely that you need to incentivise early adopters in order to establish a successful currency because there is zero value in a currency that essentially noone accepts yet. A company trying to establish a product with a network effect usually does that by spending tons of their investors' money on incentivising early adopters, which later will be recouped from late adopters and paid back to the investors with interest/dividends/whatever for the risk that they have taken, so there is nothing unusual about bitcoin doing the same - it's just in the nature of a decentralized, independent system that the late adopters have to pay early adopters directly rather than that payment being obfuscated by a controlling company.

And finally: Are you suggesting that whoever invented bitcoin got all the time they invested in order to figure out the scheme and to write the software for free? Seriously? Or was your assumption that it took no time to build the software?

Some guys invested a couple of hundred dollars in stocks and now own a fortune. I don't see the difference really. Why didn't you invest that CPU time? Come on! It was really tiny! Oh, you were busy paying stuff with Paypal and VISA, were you?

Not true, because all transactions are public, you can see that Satoshi has not sent any of his original Bitcoins anywhere. This is not to say he will never do that, but if he would, he would have done it by now.

And who created the bitcoin software? We don't know but I'm sure they are having fun selling off coins they got for free to suckers who just finished eating their tulip bulbs.

The creator of the software is presumed to have earned about 1 million BTC (currently worth around 50-100 million USD) but he hasn't spent any of it [wordpress.com]. So he's either dead, a true believer in his baby, or paranoid about his privacy and personal implications of being associated with Bitcoin.

So it's not Satoshi or the group calling themselves that who are cashing in. It's the early adopter crowd who saw the massive potential of a speculative investment to attract other speculators. These people have done nothin

It might not be a ponzi scheme, but it does carry an absurd amount of risk. The fact that people are getting wildly rich from "investing" in bitcoins proves that they are unfit for their original purpose as a currency. Currencies have to be stable in order to be useful. The massive swings we've been seeing mean that bitcoins aren't even close to stable.

You can add funds using bitcoins, so your coins are converted to EUR after adding them. You then tip in EUR. Which is not the right way IMO, tipping should be via BTC and people should be able to earn BTC with it.

yes, it's now just a system that sells the bitcoin you send instantly. of course the receiver I suppose could buy btc with it..

No, its completely the right way. Face facts- most people don't know what bitcoins are, and don't want them. They want real money- euros, dollars, etc. By automatically converting you're able to pay in BTC and the recipient gets what he wants. Very, very, very few recipients would use it if they had to be paid in BTC.

The way I got most of my bitcoins was signing up at the bitcoin forums (back when they still hung off the bitcoin.org domain) and replying to people asking for work to be done in exchange for bitcoins. I did some web work (like convert a static HTML site to WordPress) and got paid. Brilliant.The forums still sometimes have people posting opportunities like that. You should check it out. Though, the type of work you do might not be web work, but whatever sort of work you're able to do over a network.

A site that *gives* you Bitcoins would be far more popular than the site that *takes* them. Currently, to get BTC you need to buy them in Japan, and they are expensive. It's much easier to do nothing and ignore this tip jar and the entire BTC economy, since they are not influential.

BTC doesn't save you money on a gallon of milk; but it would be all the rage if that changes. But first the BTC network must solve some fundamental problems, such as how to get an instant confirmation of a transaction. Credit

I think it's unlikely that BTC will ever be used in a brick and mortar environment, but see my arguments about transaction fees below. OTOH for web based transactions if someone is ordering physical goods it's a non-issue to wait for some confirmations to hit the network (I mean by the time you have their product boxed up and ready for shipping the transaction would have already been confirmed), and if they're ordering some web based service, you can probably grant the user instant access without confirma

>The problem is that with bitcoins, I have to deal with it. I don't want to. I want a simple method of payment that guarantees me my money back if something goes wrong.
And I want a simple method of payment that once it's in my account, I know it's in my account, and not subject to removal up to six months later.

While personally I view Bitcoins as a great experiment, first step out of many that will be taken that will in fact free the individuals from the oppression of governments by giving many viable, easy to use and very attractive alternatives to all of the things that governments have usurped to themselves as monopoly power, there is currently something else that is happening with Bitcoins.